This image depicts an early Chicago church, built in 1857. Like many wooden
structures in the Windy City, this church soon succumbed to fire. While
northern Illinois was initially settled by New Englanders moving westward
across the nation's northern tier of Great Lakes, the construction of
the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the 1840s changed the area's ethnic
and religious composition. Many Irish laborers came to Illinois to find
work on the project, and established many Catholic churches. In this period
Germans, many of them Catholic also arrived in Illinois. These new arrivals
not only returned the Catholic faith that spurred the state's early French
explorers to Illinois. They also challenged Yankee Protestants' deeply
held devotion to evangelism and moral reform, including temperance. By
the 1850s the conflict between native-born Protestants and a largely Catholic
population of recent immigrants gave rise to the American Party's nativist
politics.